Episode 39
Margaret Sanger (spoken by Noma Dumezweni):
Do you believe that knowledge which enables parents to limit their families will make for human happiness and raise the moral, social and intellectual standards of population? When one speaks of moral one refers to human conduct. We know that every advance that woman has made in the last half century has been made with opposition. All of which has been based upon the grounds of immorality. When women fought for higher education, it was said that this would cause her to become imoral and she would lose her place in the sanctity of the home. When women asked for the franchise, it was said that this would lower her standard of morals, that it was not fit that she should meet with and mix with the members of the opposite sex. But we noticed that there was no objection to her meeting with the same members of the opposite sex when she went to church. The church has ever opposed a progress of women on the ground that her freedom would lead to immorality. We asked the church to have more confidence in women.
We ask the opponents of this movement to reverse the methods of the church, which aims to keep women moral by keeping them in fear and in ignorance, and to inculcate into them a higher and truer morality based upon knowledge. If we cannot trust women with a knowledge of her own body, then I claim that 2000 years of Christian teaching has proved to be a failure. We stand on the principle that birth control should be available to every adult man and woman. We believe that every adult man and woman should be taught the responsibility and the right use of knowledge. We claim that women should have the right over her own body. And to say, if she shall, or if she shall not be a mother, as she sees fit. We further claim that the first right of a child is to be desired. While the second right is that it should be conceived in love. And the third that it should have a heritage of sound health. Conscious control of offspring is now becoming the ideal and the custom in all civilized countries.
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now, episode 39. The opening audio was from a speech by Margaret Sanger, spoken by Noma Dumezweni. The speech was given at the first American birth control conference in November of 1921. With the recent US Supreme court overruling of a woman's right to have an abortion, a disposition mostly rooted in the theology that "life begins at conception" hiding the pretense that the us constitution has nothing in it that guarantees a woman's right to control anything, the history of all of this is interesting to reflect upon in regard to the broad human rights movement and the general maturation of civilization toward responsible reproduction, which is a deeply taboo subject clearly to this day as various old world values and confusions, largely rooted in religion but not entirely, have greatly distorted common sense when it comes to public health, social roles and bodily autonomy.
And then you pair in the socioeconomic climate under the infinite growth capitalist paradigm, which will be talked about more so in a moment, and you find that there is a parallel development and a feedback relationship between the evolution of religion and market capitalism. More on that in a moment, going back to Sanger, she was a pivotal figure in the American and by influential extension global women's rights movement, specifically as an activist for familial planning. In 1916, she opened the first birth control clinic in the US, which led to her arrest for providing information on contraception while later founding the American Birth Control League, which evolved into what we know today as Planned Parenthood. Now, in the breadth of all of her work and writings and influence I will comment as an aside ultimately that she's not without controversy because she's been associated to eugenics, which unfortunately many in the mid 20th century fell victim to as a pseudoscientific idea, giving foundation to such ideas as superior races, while having intolerance for people with special needs; enfeebled people and so forth.
However, when it comes to Sanger and her intent and her accomplishments and her concerns, I don't think it's intellectually honest to dismiss her in this way. In the early 20th century, eugenics was a popular idea embraced by many institutions and any comments about considering the wellbeing of offspring and by extension, the wellbeing of society as a whole were often rejected on grounds that they were elitist and would lead to elitist behavior. And that's actually understandable. And part of my point here is that as I interact with people even to this day, it's just a matter of time that people bring up eugenics when you have any concerns about population growth, sustainability, and the very simple notion of what it means to have proper conditions to raise a child so they don't become aberrated or sick or become in fact, a threat to society itself.
It's a very ignorant and unfortunate reaction. And as Sanger points out in that small excerpt, it's really about education, not coercion. My mother was a social worker for years. She literally took people's kids away from their biological parents because of the abusive conditions. She worked in the global south in deep trailer park style, white poverty. And in many cases there were generations of physical and sexual abuse, these cycles of poverty, deprivation, and abuse, and they have to be broken or they have to be prevented. And she was well aware of the complexity, the controversial nature of the conversation when it comes to that kind of thing. But she always had one way of summarizing it. If you go to adopt a child, what is the process? They evaluate your income and they make sure you're not a, you know, felon child molester. A common sense environmental assessment to make sure the child stands a chance to have a happy, healthy upbringing.
And to be clear, I'm not promoting some kind of government bureaucracy to decide if people can have children or not. Rather, this is simply highlighting the need for consideration of the environmental conditions of the parents and of society. And in the 21st century, the fact that this is a taboo conversation for many is truly shocking. Not as shocking, of course, as the fact that now half of America and in many pockets of the world still espousing these Orthodox religious views, the evolutionary role of the mother to make a pivotal decision, not only for the sake of her own health and the child's health and society's health - is taken away. And I won't go into the bodily autonomy issues where literally there's an organism growing inside of a person, part of that person. And then there's somebody external demanding that person do something with part of themselves against their will.
There's no precedent for that. It's straight, medieval religious lunacy by which women become second class citizen vessels for the sake of a completely abstracted idea of what life is. And I won't even go down the road of the patriarchal ramifications and the great human rights reversion in that context, as well. Later in the episode, I'm gonna talk about the moral reasoning behind all of this, since I mentioned this concept of life as defined by effectively the church. But I will say that this human rights issue, this regression of rights is pretty much equivalent in the context of women to black people today being forced to sit at the back of the bus. Can you imagine if that happened today? Well, that's precisely what's happened with the women's rights. Now. What about the sociology of all of this? How does religion and economics interface along with our competitive and dominance oriented culture?
How does this all fit together? Well, let's get the big picture out of the way first. While this may seem speculative and controversial, when you think about the interface between religion and economics, you realize that the end result, conspiratorial or not, is that of social control through maintaining socioeconomic division, putting some people in positions of power and control while repressing others. As far as I'm concerned, the most notable feature of capitalism and theism is that of social control as an empirical macro outcome. Capitalism does this fundamentally by the generation, the automatic generation of socioeconomic inequality, which is a mathematical inevitability. I've covered this many times on this podcast, but to briefly summarize the fact: the two dominant mechanisms that ensure preservation of the lower class is first the competitive market dynamic of trade combined with the inevitable debt based monetary system. Both of these aspects influence social stratification, moving a few to the top of the economic power pyramid while keeping the majority at the bottom, struggling, submissive, just trying to survive.
And I wanna make it clear for anyone new here that this is not a political issue or an issue of intent. At least not generally. The enormous wealth and income gaps we see across the planet with 60% of the world in poverty is not the result of greed or malicious intent. Those elements might exist, but that's not a source. It is the structure that guarantees this. And as an aside, broadly this falls in the context of what's called equilibrium theory in market economics. The theory and analysis has applied to a range of things such as supply and demand to general income and wealth distribution. And universally speaking there is no equilibrium to be found. The fantasy of the self-regulating market is just that- a fantasy. If there were no controls imposed upon the system of market economics, it would immediately blow up pushing as much money as possible to the smallest number of people while turning the planet into dust because of uncontrolled negative market externalities - those things that are not accounted for within the self-regulating capitalist fantasy.
In the words of Harvard researcher and author, Jonathan Schlefer from his book, "assumptions economists make" he states "Beginning in the 1870s, theorists sought to build a model of the invisible hand. They wanted to show how market trading among individuals pursuing self-interest and firms maximizing profit would lead to an economy of stable and optimal equilibrium. Those theorists never succeeded. Quite the contrary in the early 1970s, after a century of work, they concluded that no mechanism can be shown to lead decentralized markets toward equilibrium, unless you make assumptions that they themselves regarded as utterly implausible." And now to quickly summarize the debt issue, the second issue: all money is created out of debt and interest is charged on the loans made and that interest doesn't exist in the money supply. This does two things. First, it creates perpetual deficit. When you look at billionaires, you have to remember that all the money that they have is actually debt that somebody else has the burden for.
If you have a hundred dollars in your bank and you're not in actual debt, there's a distribution of other people out there that are in debt because of that money's existence. The global financial system on multiple levels is a massive generator of poverty in this way. Market dynamics aside, mind you. And then when you add the interest charges, not only are people struggling to pay off this distribution of debt, it is also mathematically impossible to actually pay it all off. And hence people go bankrupt. And needless to say, it's not the rich that are going bankrupt Today, there's roughly 80 trillion in currency and about 300 trillion in debt. So there's that. And a core sociological question becomes, why do people tolerate this outcome? Yes, people might not be educated in terms of these system dynamics to understand that in order to end hierarchical oppression basically, you have to change the structure of capitalism itself.
But I think most intuitively understand that there's a fundamental unfairness, right? You see billionaires on one side and the poor on the other. You see the really rich nations sucking up all the resources and outputting the most waste while the poor nations sit there and just get more and more sick. The lack of equilibrium is visceral. And one would think that there would be a push for equality, economic equality, in the same way you push for human rights equality. Over the past couple hundred years, we have made strides toward improving human rights and human relations, but everyone stops short as I've said before at the doorstep of the economy. The propaganda has been so strong that people aren't willing to question why the inequality outcomes are what they are. And if they dare to "uthoh here, come the communists," the godless communists. In America, you have all of this poverty and yet they still support politicians that don't care about them.
That don't help with that fundamental foundation. Some may be familiar in the states with a guy named Joe Manchin from West Virginia, one of the most poverty riddled areas of the United States. This poverty stricken state votes in a guy that drives a Maserati and lives on multimillion dollar yachts and whatever - profiting from the oil industry of all things at this point in time. And yet somehow they perceive him as common. Why? The same for the Trump phenomenon, of course, a billionaire that's perceived by his followers as "one of them," middle and lower class, when there's literally nothing in the policy or world views of these people that would suggest they are sympathetic to poor people. And this brings us to religion. I think the answer rests in the value system orientation that has been generated by the religious perspective, particularly the Christian perspective, which serves in part to justify all of this suffering.
Now a critical historical footnote in this kind of analysis, which isn't exactly what I'm going to be focusing on, but it's important to comment on Max Weber's famous work, "the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism" published in 1905, as he discusses the puritanical values and influences and how they helped shape capitalism, in his perspective. I would consider it more of a value system support, but I'll talk about that more in a moment... Largely attributed to the Protestant Reformation and the rise of Calvinism, a branch of Protestantism, which started in the early 16th century, easing a bit the draconian stranglehold of the Catholic church, moving Western society out of the Middle Ages and arguably setting the stage for the Enlightenment. Weber's analysis is complex. And there's certainly a lot of counterpoint to it. It's messy, but what's to be absorbed as far as I'm concerned is the fact that Protestantism specifically Calvinism set the stage for the belief structure that supports capitalism through the puritanical work ethic.
And it's this ethic, at least in part that allows for the abuse. The basic idea is that you work hard, but you do not acquiesce to luxury. And what gains you do make in terms of income or profit or whatever are reinvested back into the enterprise. Not because you need to, but simply because that is the ethic. The virtue of hard work for the sake of hard work. And this does two things, basically: one, interestingly, it pushes the idea of constant economic expansion as this, you know, isn't about minimalism. It's about work. It's neurotic in that way, as much as people consider work or virtue to this day. And obviously it is, but just working for the sake of work. Hmm. Sounds familiar. Doesn't it sounds kind of like a consumption economy. Doesn't it sounds like an economic system that needs expansion, which again, I'll talk about in a moment. In the pre axial age, religious development, you know, prior to the neolithic revolution, it's well established that there was a lot of free time.
People didn't have to work that much. They hunted and they gathered, and they played with their family in what's term, by Marshall Salins, "minimal(istic)affluency." But as with most things in theism, it's all about sucking the life and happiness out of people. So, instead of actually working for your fruits and relaxing and doing something social and healthy with your family, no, no, you just keep working for the sake of work. If you want to be in good graces with God, regardless of predestine and all of that. And you don't have to be an expert in sociology to understand how that kind of value system can be a powerful enabler of hierarchical manipulation of laborers and power preservation, intended or not. You couldn't possibly come up with a more effective value system for submission, right? And by the way, I'm not putting words in Weber's mouth because his writings see capitalism as generated by ideas, born out of the Protestant reformation, which actually I don't entirely agree with.
I think it's more an issue of geographical determinism and the inferences therein. As I write about extensively in my book, "the new human rights movement." But if you were to tell a slave that as long as they work hard, they will be in good graces with God, even though they might be desperately poor deprived, shackled and abused. Well, you have a powerful method of propaganda to keep them subservient. Hence the development of a kind of economic priesthood, the divine right of Kings, the feudalistic structure and so forth. The evolution of markets and the evolution of value systems through religion that support markets and the dominance and social control aspects of capitalism are deeply complementary. "Blessed are the poor and spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, "Matthew 5:3. So between the puritanical concept of labor, for the sake of labor, coupled with the necessary suffering of all of you sinners out there, you have a value system imposition that makes the poor, exploited and abused of this world feel like it's needed, it's necessary and it's virtuous.
And that is part of the evolution as to why people today politically vote and praise people that are completely adversarial to their own interests. Even if they don't identify as religious whatsoever. They have been so ingrained in this propaganda and this ethic that even if someone came along and just handed them money every month, like Andrew Yang or something, which you'd think anyone would rationally say, "yeah, I would love to have some kind of financial support," I'm in debt, I'm in poverty and all that. But no, they would reject that. They would reject that on effectively religious grounds, which has bred into other kinds of propaganda simultaneously, such as the evolution towards communism or socialism and hence gulags. Literally, there are people that think, if you give, say healthcare for all, you will end up in a gulag in about 10 years. Anyway, over time, all of this stuff coalesces and you end up with belief structures, belief systems; a kind of conservative belief system. A set of ideas, like "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" and "do the crime do the time."
And then of course in the Republican conservative sphere, capitalism is unquestionable. And of course, most of these people are deeply Christian, at least in the United States and confluence and coherency forms around the set of ideas, which gets transferred culturally. So anyway, that's what I wanted to cover in terms of these systems serving as a powerful means of social control and the preservation of a power structure that is based on social dominance. But then you have the meta magical overlap. If you believe something fairly esoteric, just as today, if you find someone that believes in ghosts or something, they will tend to believe in other kinds of phenomenon of that nature...past lives or some kind of astrology, whatever. And hence to believe in something magical like a God that's controlling this and that, it's not much of a leap to transfer that into magical thinking toward economics. The invisible hand of the market.
What kind of weirdass superstitious shit is that?! John Locke, Adam Smith- these are all insane, religious people. All of their writings infuse God and religion in these theories like John Locke and the concept of property. Money itself is based on faith. It is a religious symbol. The only reason it has value is because we give it value. And then of course, infinite growth. If you have a puritanical ethic, while it does support work and while it does imply growth, as stated, there is still a general rejection of overt consumption. And it was upon the efficiency increases of the industrial revolution, as I've talked about before, where the consumption belief system, the consumption value system had to be generated to keep market economics afloat, things started to adapt differently as the endogenous nature of needing infinite growth in the system became more apparent. Infinite growth on a finite planet where you're not only working all the time for the sake of work, you're consuming all the time for the sake of consuming to keep the system together.
And this brings us back to the issue of abortion and the pro-life mentality. Pro-life people are advocating the removal of any concerns about family planning and whatever births happen just happen. That is an infinite growth perspective with no consideration for the carrying capacity of the earth, which today is deeply limited by the very economy that it supports. Just to be clear here, going back to this whole eugenic nonsense, to describe the caring capacity of the earth is to only point out the fact that humans do have limits. Needless to say, infinite reproduction is simply unsustainable. And since I've already sabotaged myself with this tangent, just to be clear, there is no number that I would ascribe to the carrying capacity of the earth, because I don't think it's calculable given the complexity of our industrial efficiency and how we're doing more and more with less and less.
I'm sure the earth can hold a lot more than it does now, but that's in theory because the true constraint is not the Earth's carrying capacity. It's the inefficiency of the market economy, but that's for another conversation. But infinite economic growth on a finite planet, guess what - it needs population growth. And this is one of the more unique mathematical things that no one talks about, but I think is deeply ingrained in the intuition of proponents of this kind of magical thinking. Any reduction in population growth will be mirrored by a reduction in economic growth. You have to keep making new people to keep this system going at the levels that it is, and that's pure insanity. So while religion influences the value system of markets, I see the industrial revolution and the need for increased consumption to allow for the increased production and efficiency as a kind of transference from the structure of the system into people's values.
In other words, to support the pro-life movement is to support capitalism's drive toward infinite growth. And on that, some may be familiar with this term I sometimes use called "shadow incentive." It's about incentives that people come up with without a direct conscious relationship to what the purpose of that is to the structure of the system, supporting and reinforcing the structure of the system unknowingly as if the system through osmosis creates these values deep under the surface of consciousness, and then people grow those values and they become basically walking agents of the system. More of a food for thought speculative thing. But, you know, there's so many twisted, weird behaviors out there that keep reinforcing the hierarchical structure and the growth economy and all that. And people that are engaging this; groups that are engaging this - are not conscious of how they're reinforcing the structure, the economic structure, basically as if the system is alive and wants to preserve itself in all of its organs and mechanisms.
I saw an incredible old vintage newspaper ad, not that long ago. And it was a toothbrush that included a box of jelly beans. Shadow incentive. Because in this context, as the market system demands, you don't want to solve any problem. You wanna service problems. It's like that article that was written not that long ago by that investment firm that asked the question, hilariously, "is solving cancer a good business model." No, it's not. Now I wanna conclude with the brief summation of the concept of morality, cuz I know I did a whole podcast on this early on and the idea of singular morality versus a system's perspective, which is really quite simple. There are no moral absolutes. You can't say "this is this" because there's always gonna be an exception. Moral dilemmas, continuum problems... Life begins at conception they say and ends at death. But where along that line in the self referential relationship, can you say that you can stop and start life if that's your framework? Which is the foundation of the abortion, pro-life nonsense. You have to account for multiple things at once. If you're gonna talk about bringing human life in, well, what happens when the child's born? So many factors that are pure common sense to all of us. Cause we think about these things, but when it comes to the moral arguments, people are stuck in a gravitation towards what's called foundationalism. They wanna find something that's 100% true and it doesn't exist. Instead you have to have a relativity with it. It's called epistemological coherentism, if I can say that correctly. And that says that everything is relative to itself and moral decisions are always contingent and on a per case basis.
And people hate it when you talk that way, cuz they see the slippery slope, you know, dictators that kill lots of people in the name of the greater good and all of that. And yes, that is a problem, which is why the very epistemological framework by which you make these decisions is critical. It has to be analyzed with a purely intellectual disposition and not some kind of religious moral one where you attribute some kind of first principle foundation. That alone shatters the pro-life argument. You can only win an argument of that nature if you omit all other influences, which is precisely what the pro-life movement has done through the lens of early religion, particularly Catholicism and the stupid idea that life begins at conception when life doesn't begin a conception, it is a constant gyrating mechanism. Sperm is alive. How many pro-life people eat meat every night?
The hypocrisy and contradictions are almost infinite when it comes to this narrow thinking and in my book, "the new human rights movement," I actually have a whole section discussing moral objectiveism versus relativism. And I actually use the abortion debate as an example. All right, folks, I appreciate your time today. Just so everybody knows in the fact that, uh, , I'm no longer on Twitter. After 12 years, I had three strikes you're out going for so-called abuse. All three of which were directed in response to Joe Rogan and either his sychophants had me banned or there are bots out there that are looking for criticisms, which I think is actually the case because each one of those strikes that hit against me over the past two years, the only strikes I ever had after thousands and thousands and thousands of tweets- happened in 30 seconds or less.
And all three once again were me responding to stupid shit Joe Rogan says. So I'm no longer on Twitter, but I'm gonna be more active with my mailing list. And of course Instagram and Facebook are still there. All right, folks, I really appreciate your time. I apologize again, for the sparseness of these podcasts and general media release, I'm kind of stuck right now in a lot of different things. And it's hard for me to shift gears. It's more about quality than quantity. I kind of wish I had that sense of prolificness, but I, I just, it's very tough for me. I don't have that kind of energy. And by the way, someone also asked me about Culture in Decline. I haven't had a chance to push that forward because of resource limitations. I tried and I said, I'm gonna wait. And then right now my core focus of course is zeitgeist four, which is going a little slower, true to form. But, I'll keep everyone posted on that. All right, folks, take care out there.